Office 2007 - "Show this number of Recent Documents" grayed out

[RoBo]

Who can help me fix this problem?

When I open the Office menu in any Office application, the Recent Documents
list is empty. When I look at the program options (e.g. Excel 2007), under
Display in Advanced, I can not set the number of recent Documents that the
program need to show me on the Recent Documents list.
I have had the Microsoft "MRU Office Documents" gadget installed (and later
ununstalled) because I did not like it. The "Show this number of Recent
Documents" option is grayed out. Is there any way (e.g. regedit) to enable
this option again?

Thanks for your help and suggestions, Ron

 

[austin_it]

The following registry key worked for me:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

A DWord Value named NoRecentDocsHistory, with a value of 0 shoul
restore your Recent Documents for MS Office.

A value of 1 will disable the Recent Documents "feature."

If you're part of a domain, however, it is possible that you
administrator may be controlling this registry entry by Group Policy
and you won't be able to change it. In that case, you'll have t
contact your system admin.

See the following MS TechNet page for more information:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/regentry/93170.mspx?mfr=true

Hope this helps

 

[rsantaro]

For WindowsXP get TweakUI (Powertoys for WindowsXP, search for TweakUI at
Microsoft) and in TweakUI click on "Explorer" name in the left hand pane list
(do not click on the + sign, just the name in the list). In the Settings page
(right hand side) check the "Maintain document history" check box. This
enables the tracking of recently-opened documents in the File menu of Office
2007 applications like Word and Excel.

This works.